Author Description

The confessional of three sisters who have decided to kill themselves on the very last day of the 20th century. In the waning days of 1999, the Alter sisters finalize their plans to end their lives. Their reasons are not theirs alone; they are the last in a long line of Alters who have killed themselves, beginning with their great-grandmother, the wife of a Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist who developed the first poison gas used in World War I and the lethal agent used in Third Reich gas chambers. The chemist himself, their son Richard, and Richard's children all followed suit. Inspired in part by the troubled life of Fritz Haber, Nobel Prize winner and inventor of mustard gas.